


in a tower dark and twisted

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [56]
Category: Warlocked (Video Game)
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Captivity, Gen, Mentioned Cannibalism, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:40:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22831933
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: Sixty-eight days of endless hell and Queen Azarel had still not been rescued.
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [56]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 2
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	in a tower dark and twisted

**Author's Note:**

> 56/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #65 – war.

Azarel’s grip on the rusted nail was nearly too weak to be of any use, but somehow she managed. 

She grasped the metal piece, its rough length gritty against her stiff fingers and leaving the bloody smell of copper behind on her skin. She raised it to the wall, put its sharp point to the brick, and then nearly dropped it when her arm began to shake. She cursed under her breath, words she would never have used in polite company before all this but as she had no company now but her own – she cursed again for good measure. 

Grabbing her wrist with her other hand to steady the shaking, she used all the strength she had to force the nail down and scratch into the wall a single short, vertical line.

The nail having served its purpose, Azarel dropped the thing to the floor and felt no surprise when her arm dropped weakly to her lap with it, all her strength gone that quickly. Using the little bit that she had managed to exert left her feeling weaker than before, her arm more limp, her head dizzy.

She shut her eyes tightly for a moment and breathed deeply to try to force the dizziness away, then wished she hadn’t when all she could smell was the dank scent of her cell, her own unwashed body, and the thick stench of sulfur that hovered always present behind all of it, none of it doing anything to make Azarel feel any better at all.

She longed for the clean, pine scent of the Ice Plains, to feel the cold against her nose, to feel the cold at  _ all _ . Her cell was too hot for human comfort which only worsened the smell and the perpetual cloudiness in her mind. The heat of this place was more stifling than anything Azarel would allow in her own castle even in the harshest of winters when the slightest bit of warmth was a boon, but there was nothing that she could do about it but bear it and hope it didn’t kill her.

Azarel opened her eyes and looked disdainfully up at the wall she had just drawn on, at the line she put there and all the others she’d put before it. She counted them now, her daily ritual, starting with the first she put all those days ago and not stopping until she was at the newest.

Sixty-eight, there were.

Sixty-eight lines for the sixty-eight days since Azarel had been captured at Konjo Castle and brought to this twisted tower beyond the Fire Mountains and thrown into a cell. 

Sixty-eight days of unbearable heat, of only being given enough food and water to keep her alive by her goblin guards and not a crumb or a drop more, of having to relieve herself in a corner that was never cleaned, of not being allowed to bathe at all, of being forced to wear nothing but her undergarments because her other clothes were made for a much colder climate than the one she was in and they made her feel overheated to the point of sickness to wear, of hearing the great red dragon that guarded the tower roaring threats outside the small barred window of her cell at all hours of the night and being unable to sleep with worrying that it might somehow break in and eat her alive.

Sixty-eight days of endless hell and Queen Azarel had still not been rescued. 

She had genuinely believed in the beginning that she needed to only be patient until her men came to save her. Her knights were the most loyal in the land, her wizards were the most powerful. None of them lacked in intelligence or faith and Azarel had the utmost faith in them. They had weathered worse storms, after all. They had fought seemingly unwinnable battles in this long war before and came out victorious every time.

Azarel believed with all her heart that this would be no different, that it would only be a matter of time until they saved her and her army defeated Chief Zog and his horde once and for all, but never did Azarel think it would take quite  _ so much _ time as this. 

She would be lying if she said she hadn’t given up hope, for while Azarel’s faith was strong, it was not infinite, and the little news her goblin prison guards saw fit to impart to her on the infrequent occasions they saw fed and watered her did little to strengthen her resolve that her rescue was a certain eventuality. 

Azarel craved news from the world outside her tower cell as much as she craved more food than what she was given, but at the same time she dreaded every word those goblins brought her. She took their tales with a grain of salt as she had little doubt that they chose what to say based on what would cause her the most anguish, but she couldn’t dismiss her only word of the outside world entirely.

According to the goblins, Azarel’s army was all but lost without her there to give them orders. They’d been told she was dead, the goblins gleefully informed her, and morale was as dead as her army believed her to be. Zog was taking advantage of that and amounting victory after victory, systematically and efficiently wiping out those of Azarel’s armies who still fought and claiming her lands for his own.

Humans were being destroyed everywhere and the ones who weren’t lucky enough to meet a quick death faced an even worse fate: enslavement. 

Azarel’s own wizards hadn’t been spared from those horrors. 

Elvenwiz, enslaved by Zog to be put to uses that made Azarel ill to hear of. 

Icewiz, burned alive by Zog’s own wizards at the stake.

And most horrendous of all, Chickenwiz, cooked and eaten by goblins, parts of his flesh brought back to a starving Azarel who had only been informed of what meat she had been given after she’d already consumed it.

After she finished vomiting, Azarel found herself praying for the first time not for rescue but that her other wizards died quick and painless deaths rather be subjected to the likes of those three. She desperately wanted to hear word of them, but at the same times wished more than anything that she would never hear of them again for she knew that no news the goblins brought her of her friends would be good. 

And so Azarel spent her days in a state of despair, her body growing weak and her mind bleaker by the minute. 

She wished she had the will to simply choose to die herself, to refuse the water and the food the goblins brought her, to take that rusted nail she had pried from a wall in her first days of captivity and open her veins with them. There would at least be some dignity in that, in being able to choose the manner of her own death rather than to give Zog and his beasts the satisfaction of choosing whatever it was that would be done with her when the time came. 

But despite her despair there was still a part of Azarel that simply did not want to die – that wanted to do nothing more than continue to live.

She would try to refrain from drinking or eating, but always she would come to the brink of thirst and starvation and find her hands reaching for the food and water almost without her choosing to do so. She would hold that nail to her filthy wrists, but never could she bring herself to gouge it into the skin and hit those delicate roads of flowing lifeblood beneath.

Azarel used to think her dedication to life and living it to the fullest was her greatest strength, but now in a harsh twist of irony it had become the very thing keeping her in this horrible place. 

It had become her most agonizing weakness. 

She had no illusions that Zog would keep her alive once he was done destroying her kingdom or that one day her goblin guards wouldn’t just decide to kill her themselves. There was no kind fate waiting at the end of her journey and being able to take her own life would, in many ways, be the most merciful thing she could do for herself to spare herself the pain of whatever it was these beasts planned for her.

And yet Azarel could not do it. 

She could only while away the time, marking down her days on the wall, suffering and waiting, but not knowing what it was she was waiting for. 

She only knew it would be horrible. With Zog in control of her destiny, Azarel knew it could not be anything but.


End file.
